


The Light Below: A Decadent Pastiche

by farevenasdecidedtouse



Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar
Genre: Body Horror, Borderline/Implied Snuff, Branding, F/F, Mild Gore, Multi, Other, Trying To Be J.K. Huysmans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-27
Updated: 2018-03-27
Packaged: 2019-04-08 17:04:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14109996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/farevenasdecidedtouse/pseuds/farevenasdecidedtouse
Summary: An academic's Correspondence studies yield unexpected results.





	The Light Below: A Decadent Pastiche

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Snickfic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickfic/gifts).



The Academic Libertine had grown to her majority in a cavern of earthly delights such as a pantomime djinn might only have dreamt of. She had, from the first, sought out every such delight offered by the Neath from the simple pleasures of childhood to the depraved excitements of a degenerate maturity, only to find that most palled as quickly as not before her rapacious appetites. The savor of both Neathly and Surface foods diminished, the consumption of other substances proved alternately boring and unpleasant, and the pleasures of the flesh from the Palace of Virtue to the Feast of the Exceptional Rose to the strange sciences of the Rubbery Men were eventually rendered as commonplace as breath by sheer repetition.

The pursuits of the mind, however, with their infinite subtlety and variation eclipsed every baser diversion offered by harlot or Master or Rubbery Man. Though enthralled by the intricate clockwork precision of mathematics and the delicious enigmas of the alienist’s arts, the less-mundane subjects her academic predations led her into were finer still. In her second year as a Benthic College student, the acquisition of the term “Correspondence” and its myriad implications left mathematics and psychology moldering in obscurity. Her attacks upon the theories of its origins and the effects of its sigils on divers materials, however, soon became secondary to the experience of the phenomenon itself. While her fellow Benthic students limited their perusal of sigils to stable clusters of seven, she could not help dwelling on each in turn, sketching them on char-edged paper to provoke the comprehension of meaning that blossomed, flower-like, in her psyche with each glance. The fascination insinuated itself into her mind like fruiting-bodies into loamy soil, each newly-revealed nuance to a glyph seeming to lap at her mind in the manner of a lover devouring her lips or labia. Every ruined coif or cravat stained with a nosebleed, every sick headache accompanied by lilac halos tinged with cosmogone only added to her resolve, each its own foil to the sharper pleasure of the burning, roaring _awareness_ that accompanied each contemplation of a glyph.

The first furthering of experience came from a depraved woman who styled herself Barbican as a petty affront to the Masters’ proscription of London’s former place-names and who was often lampooned by periodical cartoonists as a pair of prodigious bosoms sporting an Exceptional Hat. Plied with absinthe and cheese-stuffed morels, the Libertine had reclined on a divan as Miss Barbican procured a fine-haired brush and painted upon the Libertine’s closed eyelids, nipples, throat, belly, and sex in lurid red paint symbols that ached and singed with every stroke. Absorbed somewhere between note-taking and pleasuring herself with a vibrating mechanical device, Miss Barbican watched, her legendary bosoms flushed carmine and her moans interspersed with orders to _still yourself, turn to your side, spread your legs wider_. Captivated first by the pain, the Libertine slowly felt the awful meaning of each word unfurl beneath her skin and inside her mind with a sick pleasure unfurling in her lower body like a poisonous flower until, in a single instant, something beyond climax gripped her and words like Enochian spilled from her throat like a ululating music. When her consciousness returned she found herself lying on the tiled floor of Miss Barbican’s water closet, half-drowned by a pitcher of water and closer to death than she had ever felt herself. Deaf to questions regarding her well-being she stared through the high window at the false-stars, body heated, throbbing, gravid with desire and more covetous of more such experiences than she had ever felt.

Her health declined, though it had never been robust following her search for more earthly enjoyments, and her rooms were heady with fumes of singed hair and the opium and prisoner’s honey of which she partook to bring herself closer to understanding. With her freshly-bandaged burns throbbing under soot-stained clothing, she spent her days partaking of these substances as well as seeking out steadily more obscure treatises on the Correspondence. Some of these dated from the Fall of London and were filled with deliberate mysticism and ridiculous speculation. Some hailed from prior Cities, their spindly Oriental characters and age-dimmed pictograms translated for her with a diminishing inheritance that did not go toward opium or basic necessities. Every resource was earmarked to return her to the blessed, burning oblivion of the Correspondence, aided more often than not by the more sublunary pleasure-seeker Miss Barbican, her newfound patroness. In lieu of any other acquaintances who shared her passion to such extremes, Miss Barbican seemed to the Libertine an acceptable counterpart, if not an inspired sister in devotion. As the Libertine’s search for this transcendence had come not through the mystic visions of ascetic devotion but through the sheer pursuit of experience it seemed apt enough to employ a neophyte of the same search, too greedy of the climactic spasms that wracked the Libertine with every soft, smoking brushstroke to truly understand how they labored together.  The mundanely physical pleasures of these encounters sharpened the satisfaction, yet distracted as well, like a too-inviting bed on a late morning or the insinuating warmth of a fire in sharp, mind-clearing cold. Content with and desirous of nothing but this newfound passion, the Academic's hunger for it made her flush and throb with arousal that no amount of mundane intercourse could satisfy.

Her own experimentation revealed a greater purity of effect simply from a meditation upon certain sigils, or from the same carved anywhere on her own skin with the tip of a knife, sitting alone in the cold, cluttered quarters that the Benthic administration allowed her to occupy for the occasional appearance at lectures and an incoherently-worded treatise every other month. This deprivation born of necessity rendered the Libertine a holy celebrant in truth, shining in darkness, ecstatic at the touch of light. Dreams of the Surface tempted her at times, yet the mundanity of daylight spoken of by travelers seemed still more a distracting luxury than her writhings with Miss Barbican. The sun of the Surface, the sun of those children of the light they had all once been, bore little to no resemblance to the sublime thing evoked by the smallest stroke of the Correspondence. What could the gentle, anodyne caress of a remote star compare to the rapacious living fire whose merest syllable throbbed inside her body and mind like an erotic ague, leaving her aching and unsatisfied with every longer absence from its light?

In this dissatisfaction, her experiments grew yet more extreme. Clathermont himself balked at a tattoo, directing her to a name which she immediately forgot and could not for the life of her subsequently recall. A scholarly friend of hers agreed until the ink boiled in the pot and the needle melted, leaving her with a half-finished _A Willing Sacrifice_ in the small of her back and scorch marks beading her shoulders. Her own attempts frustrated, she turned once more to Miss Barbican, who suggested branding with a casual academic air that made the Libertine smile.

***

She had been stripped, anointed with oil by the hands of multiple dissipated acquaintances, and brought to the usual spot near the Observatory where the less-dedicated gathered about her like faithful to a beautiful martyr. She tolerated, even enjoyed, their laughing attentions, their behavior little different from such at one of Miss Barbican’s salons-cum-Roman orgies.

The process began slowly, each individual line or curve (their intricate shapes created by a merchant of the Bazaar side-streets sworn to secrecy) heated in a small crucible that soon became unnecessary as the brands began to smoke and glow within mere proximity to her flesh. With the completion of _Promises_ between her hunger-slack breasts her cries echoed to the false-stars, interspersed with ragged gasps and pleas for more of the sensation she had only begun to feel creeping into the edges of her consciousness. She had been fucked by those around her on occasion—the degenerate artist who kissed and licked indiscriminately between the Libertine’s legs, the mustached lech who slid his prick inside her with a satisfied groan at every tremor from the brand’s kiss, Miss Barbican herself attending to the Libertine’s every curve and hole with a fervor absent even from their most enthusiastic coupling in her townhome. In this moment, however, every climax provided her by the rude pleasure-seekers of the Neath washed over her like breezes before a great zee-storm, smoke like spume gusting from her heat-reddened flesh as if in anticipation of the conflagration she desired.

With the completion of _The Knotted Serpent_ across her thigh, her shrieks of pain were no longer distinguishable from those of rapture. Fiery fingers caressed her lower body with the dexterity of a Rubbery Man’s tentacles.

With the completion of _Calumny_ in the hollow of her throat, her voice gave out. The pain forced its way into her, opening her every orifice until she felt impaled upon it, consumed by a hunger like that of a fire that devoured not gross matter but life itself.

With the completion of _The Unconstrained Velocity_ above the curve of her sex, her impression was not that of a human with fiery eyes and a touch that burned with prosaic heat, but an entity like the celestial spheres she had seen only in opium-laced honey-dreams. A being like the sun itself, like the sigils carved into the living chitin of the Bazaar. Intimations of language and light flared inside her ears, her open mouth, her wet, needy cunt. The base desires of her gross and terrestrial form quailed before this force of nature and yet welcomed it, wantonly spreading her very mind to accept its caresses.

With the completion of _The Absence of Breath_ across her other thigh, other glyphs had begun to emerge over her skin, limned in veins that seemed to flow with magma instead of blood. Groupings of seven emerged around her breasts, along her palms, within her mouth, pinpricks of pure, burning ecstasy. Some few of her fellow celebrants made as though to touch, the more fearful of them starting back at the heat, the bolder running scorching and reverent fingertips over her bubbling flesh.

With the completion of _A Day That Lasts a Thousand Years_ between her eyes her body was no longer her own. She was a vessel, the bride of a monstrous spouse whose attentions covered and _filled_ her, blazing from her every orifice and the line of every glyph, warping the prison of her spirit with every single beyond-a-climax seared into the living form that bound her.

With the completion of the incomplete _A Willing Sacrifice_ , the thing that had once been the Academic Libertine was soundlessly screaming, yearning, burning, no longer aware of the celebrants around her who rutted like beasts with each other in her light. As her own consciousness faded, subsumed entirely into celestial rapture, the Libertine’s fulfillment was finally, inarguably, complete.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to beta reader and best commentator ever Aansero for helping me whip this into shape.


End file.
